Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The pro-RH lie

IN last week’s senate hearing a Pro-RH Senator finally admitted that the heavily hyped eleven maternal deaths per day in the Philippines is a public relations phrase “used by NGOs to drive home a point.” The doctoring of statistics is certainly a case of intellectual dishonesty that can never be whitewashed by any intention no matter how good.

In this case, the intention is even doubly dubious in the sense that it is now obviously deceiving some tax payers into believing that there is an urgent need for a legislation that will cut down on maternal deaths. But of course more frightening is the fact that this deception has found its way into text books of schools to teach young minds and ultimately trigger a perspective and behavior that will look at pregnancy as death-causing and therefore should be avoided like a disease. And look at how the pro-RH diehards are trying to convince legislators and the public that birth control pills are “essential medicines”.

The “driving home a point” alibi is not actually as comfortable and slight as it seems; it is actually a lot more penetrating that will sadly cause a long term effect in education and mores, like it is now happening in the West and in most European countries. Naiveté aside, the scheme is sinister, the program is global.

The same maybe said of the gigantic figures of abortion incidence in the country that Senator Santiago has raised to 570,000 annually which, if true, is easily half the number of abortions in the United States where abortion is legal and where the population is roughly four times more than the Philippines.

Reportedly, she has based her claim on the 2008 extrapolations by the Guttmacher Institute and the UP Population Institute—which analogically is like asking thieves about the incidence robberies in the country. The New York-based Guttmacher Institute is the former research arm of the pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortion services in the US.

Of course these abortion figures are, to borrow Santiago’s term, “taken from thin air.” The Guttmacher statistics were mere extrapolations of a projected 90,000 or so admissions in hospitals across the country in 2008 due to abortion complications and then multiplying it by a factor of 6 or 7. At the Senate Hearing last week, this prompted Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile to say: “In other words this may or may not be true,” referring to the half billion alleged cases of abortion in the country annually, to which Santiago replied in the affirmative.

But one thing good with the RH Bill debates is that cans of worms are getting opened and more lies are being exposed. Another one is, in all debates conducted by television networks that are mostly pro-RH, the numbers are slowly but surely favoring where the truth is.